Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

REEFER MADNESS!

 

A year ago The Guardian reported the findings of one Roger Pertwee, professor of neuropharmacology at Aberdeen University. He was calling for the legalisation of cannabis under licence for adults over 21. In support of him, the rather appealingly named Professor David Nutt, sacked chair of the government’s Advisory Council on the Misue of Drugs, said: As cannabis is clearly less harmful than alcohol, criminalisation of people who prefer this drug is illogical and unjust. We need a new regulatory approach to cannabis. The Dutch coffee-shop model is one that has been proven to work but some of Professor Pertwee's new suggestions may well have extra benefits and should be actively debated.

Those who have worked energetically for greater leniency in the fraught issue of the status of narcotics within the law are likely to be greatly encouraged by these robust statements, seeing in them a further step towards at least the partial legalisation of proscribed drugs. Correspondingly, those for whom illegal drug usage represents a fundamental attack on the very fabric of society itself will be dismayed.

As for the substance of the debate itself, both sides have concentrated almost entirely on issues such as long-term health risks, links between cannabis and other drugs and the nature of dependency.  The proponents of liberalisation are satisfied that nearly all available data provides no indication of there being any significant cause for concern in relation to these and kindred issues.  And their case is the more powerful in that, after several decades of agitation, it has gathered up not only the usual Liberal and Labour suspects but also a considerable number of resolute Conservatives.   

However, for many of the old guard in the pro-legalisation camp – those whose younger years were passed within a fug of heavy rock and dope smoke - an interesting dilemma has emerged.  Many of them must have assumed, in a bleary sort of way, that significant movements towards legalisation could only take place within an enlightened and progressive political, cultural and social climate. The enemy, after all, was ever to be located within the forces of reaction, the suits, the faceless institutionalists.  The legalisation of cannabis would be part of a broader wave of long-awaited changes including, maybe, mass recycling projects, free public transport, crèches as standard provision in all workplaces.
 
But now confusion reigns: this bold step forward has been taken by ostensibly reactionary, suit-wearing, traditional establishment figures. So, in event of further movement down the path towards the ultimate legalisation of cannabis, how does the grizzled dope-for-all pioneer imagine the coordination and regulation of the processing and marketing of legal cannabis would now take place?  Maybe the government will make the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs responsible for the setting up of regulated plantations on which legal cannabis will be grown and harvested by hitherto impoverished farmers.  At a stroke the ongoing depression in agriculture will be lifted and the responsible management of the production and supply of cannabis will be clearly established. 

Not, in fact, the most likely route at all.  The reality is that, as we speak, conscience-free chemists are working on the blending, kids in Ralph Lauren shirts are working on the marketing, designers in Paul Smith suits are working on the packaging and executives in very high buildings with names like British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco and Phillip Morris above the big glass doors are guess-timating the enormous profits that they’re going to realise from the sales of the first legal spliffs.

So what does a poor boy do if he believes fiercely in the right of every citizen to have a bit of blow now and then?  Grow his own?  Not if a crucial part of the deal is that only the properly constituted companies are permitted the right to grow and market weed. And who’s going to care from whence comes this great benefice?  Not the 50% of 15-year-olds who have, at the very least, sampled a joint at a party or behind the proverbial bike sheds.  Not the Thames-side futures broker who keeps a stash in the penthouse. And not the tobacco companies and their shareholders who, in a time of dire crisis, see a way out of the gloom.
 
What doesn’t kill a government makes it strong.  Ideas and notions once revolutionary are always assimilated eventually by the great, sprawling, mutating institution that we are pleased to call the democratic state.  Adopted, adapted, digested and then regurgitated as implemented policy. Something to puff on ruminatively while the debate retains its potency…

 

Up to town first thing tomorrow for a meet-up with old e-friends. Back late afternoon for a report and some overdue comment responding. And so to bed...

SMALL SONGS : 5

GHOSTS IN THE GRAIN

This is the fence my father built.
Through his hands each nail
was passed. His thick white fingers felt
their stems; his long back lifted every rail.

Ghosts live within this grain. Like splinters
memories pierce the skin, I’m drawn
back through summers, back through winters,
back to the doorstep of the dawn.

He’s long gone now from bowling green,
from shady grove and Eden’s gate.
Shadow-thin, he stands between
the sea of chance, the land of fate. 

Part Three



From TEACHING AS A SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITY

Thank God there are no free schools or printing… For learning has brought disobedience and heresy into the world, and printing has divulged them… God keep us from both.
SIR WILLIAM BERKELEY, Governor of Virginia, d. 1677

:::

The institution we call ‘school’ is what it is because we made it that way.  If it is irrelevant, as Marshall McLuhan says; if it shields children from reality, as Norbert Wiener says; if it educates for obsolescence, as John Gardner says; if it does not develop intelligence, as Jerome Bruner says; if it is based on fear, as John Holt says; if it avoids the promotion of significant learnings, as Carl Rogers says; if it induces alienation, as Paul Goodman says; if it punishes creativity and independence, as Edgar Friedenberg says; if, in short, it is not doing what needs to be done, it can be changed; it must be changed.

:::

In our society, as in others, we find that there are influential men at the head of important institutions who cannot afford to be found wrong, who find change inconvenient, perhaps intolerable, & who have financial or political interests they must conserve at any cost.  Such men are, therefore, threatened in many respects by the theory of the democratic process and the concept of an ever-renewing society.

 :::

The principles of educational process now

::    Passive acceptance is a more desirable response to ideas than active criticism.

::    Discovering knowledge is beyond the power of students and is, in any case, none of their business.

::    Recall is the highest form of intellectual achievement, and the collection of unrelated ‘facts’ is the goal of education.

::    The voice of authority is to be trusted and valued more than independent judgement.

::    One’s own ideas and those of one’s classmates are inconsequential.

::    Feelings are irrelevant in education.

::    There is always a single, unambiguous Right Answer to a question.

::    English is not history and history is not science and science is not art and art is not music, and art and music are minor subjects and English, history and science are major subjects, and a subject is something you ‘take’ and, when you have taken it, you have ‘had’ it, and if you have ‘had’ it, you are immune & need not take it again. (The Vaccination Theory of education?)

:::

‘What’s Worth Knowing?’  [1.]
 
What do you worry about most?

What are the causes of your worries?

Can any of your worries be eliminated?

Which of them might you deal with first? How do you decide?

If you had an important idea that you wanted to let everyone (in the world) know about, how might you go about letting them know?

What bothers you most about adults? Why?

How do you want to be similar to or different from adults you know when you become an adult?

What, if anything, seems to you to be worth dying for?

How did you come to believe this?

What seems worth living for?

How did you come to believe this?

How can you tell ‘good guys’ from ‘bad guys’?

How can ‘good’ be distinguished from ‘evil’?

At the present moment, what would you most like to be doing? Five years from now? Ten years from now? Why?  What might you have to do to realize these hopes? What might you have to give up in order to do some or all of these things..?

:::

On Languaging

It turns out…that language is far from being neutral in the process of perceiving, as well as in the process of evaluating perceptions.  We have been accustomed to thinking that language’ expresses’ thought & that it ‘reflects  ‘ what we see. We now know that this belief is naïve & simplistic, that our languaging process is fully implicated in any & all of our attempts to assess reality.

:::

Proposals for action in the classroom

1.  Declare a 5-year moratorium on the use of all textbooks.  (If it is impossible to function without textbooks, provide every student with a notebook filled with blank pages and have (them) compose (their) own text)

2. Have English teachers teach maths, maths teachers English, social studies teachers science, science teachers art, and so on.

3. Transfer all the elementary school teachers to high school and vice versa.

4. Require every teacher who thinks he knows his subject well to write a book on it. (In this way he will be relieved of the necessity of inflicting his knowledge on other people, particularly his students).

5. Dissolve all subjects, courses, and especially course requirements. (This proposal, all by itself, would wreck every existing educational bureaucracy. The result would be to deprive teachers of the excuses presently given for their failures and to free them to concentrate on their learners).

6. Limit each teacher to three declarative sentences per class, and fifteen interrogatives. (Every sentence above the limit would be subject to a … fine. The students can do the counting and collecting).

7. Prohibit teachers from asking any questions they already know the answers to. (This proposal would not only force teachers to perceive learning from the learner’s perspective, it would help them to learn how to ask questions that produce knowledge).

8. Declare a moratorium on all tests and grades. (This would remove from the hands of teachers their major weapons of coercion and would eliminate two of the major obstacles to their students’ learning anything significant).

9. Require all teachers to undergo some for of psychotherapy as part of their in-service training. (Its purpose: to give teachers an opportunity to gain insight into themselves, particularly into the reasons they became teachers).

10. Classify all teachers according to their ability and make the lists public.

11. Require all teachers to take a test prepared by students on what the students know. (Only if a teacher passes this test should he be permitted to teach).

12. Make every class an elective and withhold a teacher’s monthly cheque if his students do not show any interest in going to next month’s classes.  (This test would simply put teachers on a par with other professionals, e.g. doctors, dentists, lawyers etc….)

13. Require every teacher to take a one-year leave of absence every fourth year to work in some field other than education. (Such an experience can be taken as evidence, albeit shaky, that the teacher has been in contact with reality at some point in his life…)

14. Require each teacher to provide some sort of evidence that he or she has had a loving relationship with at least one other human being. (If the teacher can get someone to say, ‘I love her (or him)’, she should be retained. If she can get two people to say it, she should get a raise…)

15. Require that all the graffiti accumulated in the school toilets be reproduced on large paper and be hung in the school halls.  (Graffiti that concern teachers and administrators should be chiselled into the stone at the front entrance of the school)

16. There should be a general prohibition against the use of the following words and phrases: teach, syllabus, covering ground, IQ, make-up, test, disadvantaged, gifted, accelerated, enhancement, course, grade, score, human nature, dumb, college material, and administrative necessity)

:::

‘What’s Worth Knowing?’ [2.]

What do you hear if you are in a car and it is raining outside?

Describe the odor of gasoline.

What sounds do you hear if you are walking with heavy boots in deep snow?  (Don’t use the word ‘crunch’)
 
What does hair feel like?

Describe the texture of skin.  Feel it.

How would you describe fear?

Describe the odor of freshly cut grass.

Describe the sensation of placing an ice cube against your lips.

Is there a particular odor in the air before a rainfall?  Describe it.

If your hand slides across a piece of silk, what sensation do you feel?

If you were to walk barefoot along a beach of pebbles, what would you feel?

What does your hand feel like?

What does someone else’s hand feel like?

Describe the taste of salt.

Describe the flight of a seagull.

:::

Well, if you got this far, you’re a teacher, a student or someone who shares my conviction that if there exists a forum wherein the revolution might be fomented, it’s the school.

 I shall now climb down from my hobbyhorse and resume my customary diet of poems, polemic, piss-takes and pics.

Part Two

EDUCATION: A MANUAL FOR REVOLUTION

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s liberation issues were discussed within education every bit as energetically as they were within other social and cultural institutions.  A number of heavy hitters emerged whose work had an acuteness of focus, a substance and a breadth of vision unusual at a time when reason and intellect were taking a back seat to magic and mystery. Even here in these ruthlessly pragmatic, defiantly post-ideological times in which cynicism and realpolitik rule, the names of A.S. Neill, Paulo Freire, John Holt, Paul Goodman, Carl Rogers, Abraham H. Maslow, George Isaac Brown still have some resonance.

I started teaching in 1967, having drifted into it rather reluctantly after three years of playing in rock bands and generally abusing my constitution at a prestigious London college.  However, I embraced the Revolution with enthusiasm and, teaching being my trade, I read anything that claimed to be a manual for radical change in the classroom and playground. As the heady ‘70s got under way, I managed to get from cover to cover in most of the books written by the New Age warriors above.

But it wasn’t until I’d been teaching for a few years and had had my experiential cherry well and truly popped that I came across a book that really did pull me up short.  After reading it my perspectives on education and schooling – already radicalised by my own childhood experiences - altered irrevocably. Never again did I confuse the two.

In 1969 a small book called Teaching as a Subversive Activity was published.  Although slim, Neil Postman’s and Charles Weingartner’s radical little volume punched way above its weight.  Occupying the same ideological territory as Freire, Holt, Goodman et al, it radiated a freshness and accessibility and, most winningly, a playful practicality that the others’ books – noble and relevant though they were – didn’t necessarily have.  I was introduced to it in my last term at the jungle outpost that passed for a boys’ secondary school on the wild side of Deptford (which was, in fact, all wild side) and, page-by-page, I realised that not only was I a foot soldier in the most important campaign of the war but that there were strategies being drafted and tactics being planned that could win us that war. Revolutionary change in education, the book told us, will cause ‘everything to change’. I absorbed its erudition, its humour, its poetry, its acute perception of the nature of the tendentious and politicised lie that is institutionalised education in the urban world. I saw the book as a manifesto, a blueprint that, when fully realised, would sweep away for ever the black blazers, the rigid rows of desks, the endless, echoing cream-and-green corridors, the violence, formal and informal, the great swathes of asphalt, the sound of chalk screeching on blackboards, the despair, the apathy, the lobbing of dog-eared books across a classroom, the wielding of bricks in a playground.

But of course the educational revolution never happened and the anti-authoritarian equations calculated by Postman and Weingartner were denied their proof. Suddenly, in one of those seismic cultural shifts that confound historical trends, to be Right was romantic. In Britain Margaret Thatcher happened; in the United States Ronald Reagan happened; there erupted that great geyser of legitimised greed and acquisitiveness in the late ‘70s and during the ‘80s it engulfed the Western world.  And here we are now on the other side of it but with the ideological wreckage it left behind all around us still.  Within government, within politics in general, we have been freed from the ties, the constraints, the ethical guidelines that once provided some sort of philosophical benchmark by which to articulate, or at least inform, policy.  The natural corollary of such a willing abandonment of ideology in the pursuit of realpolitik and the culture of limitless and unregulated wealth is now apparent to all: wreckage again, but this time real, palpable and – pace the financiers whose ruthlessly acquired wealth and insatiable gluttony has made of them a new aristocracy – universally evident.

Depressed by the news once again and moved suddenly by a sense of what might have been, I took Teaching as a Subversive Activity down from the bookcase the other day.  Flicking through the pages and then sitting down and re-reading more thoroughly, I was struck by the freshness and continuing validity of what had inspired me nearly 35 years earlier.  Where Winston Smith in 1984 speculated that the only hope for a better world lay with the proles, Postman and Weingartner place their faith in the young and in Teaching as a Subversive Activity they ask of education that most fundamental of questions: What’s worth knowing?

(Concluded tomorrow)

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one learned in school.
ALBERT EINSTEIN



Part One

I’m returning to well-trodden territory here: education in a time of doubt, fear and ignorance. Apologies to those who have gone under the hooves of this particular hobbyhorse before. I promise I’ll talk fast.

There’s a possibility that I might be called on to offer some supply teaching at St Christopher (known generally as St Chris), the school in which I held my last full-time post, that of Head of Drama. Although I miss the form-filling, the SAT-setting, the quantitative assessing, the perpetual grading into separate human heaps with all the keen nostalgia of one who has escaped the embrace of the iron maiden, I have yearned from time to time for the interaction with students and colleagues that goes on at the stifled centre of it all. So if it’s proffered I may well return, albeit in much reduced dimension, to the most important environment available to us beyond the family.

:::

If at this bemused and sceptical stage of my life I have still in process any passionate commitment to a specific cause it’s in my conviction that education is the key to both to individual self-enhancement and collective social evolution. That’s education. Not directive teaching, or managed learning, or orchestrated schooling, or structured discipline, but education. Education: the process whereby, through direct personal experience in constant interaction with student peers and adults within a human scale, self-governed community of equals, the individual, advancing at his/her own speed, begins the process of acquiring skills in balance with developing emotional growth, engaging in creative activity and perceiving and interpreting, free from imposed standards and conditions, initially the immediate and then gradually the wider world.

However noble the sentiments and elevated the aspirations, it’s all words, just words. And with a few adjustments in the pairing of adjectives and adverbs and the permutation of the ideas enshrined, the words employed might pass just as effectively in the representation of a diametrically opposed vision for education.

So how best to represent that mode of education in which I believe? To try to characterise it clearly I shall draw on some of the components that I used in a lengthy post on the subject in 2006. A number of clear, coherent and sometimes beautiful utterances on the subject have travelled with me through life. Here’s a selection.

ON CHILDREN (an extract)

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you…
KAHLIL GIBRAN (1883 – 1931)
Lebanese/American poet and writer

:::

I would rather Summerhill produced a happy street sweeper than a neurotic prime minister. In all countries, capitalist, socialist or communist, elaborate schools are built to educate the young. But all the wonderful labs and workshops do nothing to help Jane or Peter or Ivan surmount the emotional damage and the social evils bred by the pressure on him from his parents, his schoolteachers, and the pressure of the coercive quality of our civilisation.

The function of the child is to live his own life – not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows best. All this interference and guidance on the part of adults only produces a generation of robots.
A.S.NEILL (1883 – 1973)
Pioneer educator and founder of the first ‘free school’, Summerhill.

:::

If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness.
CARL ROGERS (1902 – 1987)
Psychologist and founding father of humanistic psychology

:::

Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.
W.B. YEATS (1865 – 1939}
Poet and visionary.

:::

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.
PAULO FREIRE (1921 – 1997)
Brazilian educationalist and pedagogic revolutionary

(Continued)

SMALL SONGS : 4

THIS HOUSE

This weave of bricks,
its warp and weft,
a stack of tricks
to take the heft
through all the years
the walls have stood.

This window high,
its rainbow face
reflecting sky,
a fading trace,
dim souvenirs
in glass and wood.

This broken track
that winds away,
the coming back
to light of day,
these standing tears
for what was good.

One hit since 4.00 yesterday afternoon. A record, I think.

SMALL SONGS 3.

GREATER LOVE

Maybe it’s what we do the best;
God knows, we’ve had the practise,
pinpoint the targets - trash the rest.
Brothers in arms, entente or axis,

roll on down like wind and water,
drown the living world in seconds.
But what drives us to the slaughter?
Prophets’ words:  Revelations reckons

one more party then the schism.
God’s the engine: hail and praise -
lead us to the cataclysm.
Cross or crescent: end of days.

Crusade, jihad, genocide:
just peasants wasted in the rain.
It’s holy writ, love sanctified
and then the bloodfeast once again.

No greater love than this, the gift
of flesh and spirit - willing givers.
So let’s cast the earth adrift.
We love the world: let’s take it with us.

SEPTEMBER 11th, 2001

I was sitting in my office/teaching room in the theatre at St Chris, waiting for my Upper 6th Theatre Studies group to arrive. This was the first term of their last year of school and I’d prepared an introduction to the final parts of the syllabus. Neatly stacked at the end of my desk were the worksheets that they’d need and in the VCR was a video of Brecht directing Arturo Ui for the Berliner Ensemble. They were late.

A and Z came in first, followed immediately by C and R and the rest of the eight-strong class. They looked shaken.

“Have you seen what’s happening in New York?” asked Z. “We’ve just been watching it on the tele in the 6th Form Common Room”.

I shrugged and started to fan out the stapled worksheets for distribution.

“No. I’ve been getting this lesson ready, guys, and you’re all five minutes late”.

“Turn on the TV”, said A.

Something in her manner had me reaching for the remote and as the picture flickered into focus on the old TV set we saw in close-up thick clouds of red-tinged smoke billowing out of the top section of one of the two towers of the World Trade Center. A voice hoarse with tension was describing the collision of a Boeing 757 with the top of the tower as the camera jerked and wobbled in and out, its frantic amateurish scrutiny of the blazing building expressing perfectly the atmosphere of panic and horror.

Eyes fixed on the screen, the students found seats and we fell silent. The off-camera voices rasped a shared commentary, speculating on what had happened, pitch rising and falling as the smoke cleared and then obscured again. But beyond the palpable fact of a plane having crashed into the tower nothing was apparent as to cause.

And then, as the picture changed to a long-shot of the north tower belching smoke, fire and debris with the south tower concealed by the camera position, from off-screen right a second Boeing 757 sped into shot. For a moment the false perspective created by the camera’s depth-of-field distance rendered its trajectory unclear. Then it disappeared behind the north tower and a second later a cataract of flame belched out as the plane struck the south tower.

It was clear then that we were watching the rapid unfolding of something both horrific and inexorable. The graphic immediacy of events and the vivid clarity of their depiction held us transfixed. Beyond intakes of breath and murmurs of disbelief, no one spoke as the narrative unreeled before us: the peeling off of huge sections of the towers, the great pillars of fire, the debris that swirled up into the sky on the convection currents, and then – initially defying belief - the tiny figures plummeting from the upper storeys.

The students’ faces were stricken. From a day of commonplace concerns and idle diversions they had been propelled into a vicarious experience that would stay with them for the rest of their lives. Even as I uttered the words, I was conscious of their bathos:

“The world will never be the same after this”.

:::

NIGHT

One can conceive of this
only in terms of night.

And deep within the pitch
of this night, like ashes rising

against a wall of shadows,
something like a man moves.

There is breathing inside
this dark. There are voices.

There are words spoken.
And from this discourse

we read humanity. But
there is a dislocation: blood

runs black; it circumvents
the heart. And the filament

that heats to light gutters
like a snapped nerve:

each synapse carries
a twisted charge. And

from all this grow deeds
whose doing lies beyond

the farthest edges
of the dreams we share.